I actually got some work done today. I managed to ink and flat the volcano demon. I’ve decided that she’s a Swansea City AFC fan. Her dream has always been to play in the Premier League.
Today all went well with my medical exam. The Cologuard test dealt me bad hand, a false positive result that condemned me to laxative hell. My review of Cologuard: thumbs down. Think thrice if your MD recommends it.
When I got home I ate my first solid meal in two days. Then I took a nap. About noon I went to my online part-time job and did my thing. At about 3 pm I set up a backup drive for my Windows machine, then I looked at some children’s picture books to see what kind of fonts they were using — I was thinking my comic book font, Komika, was looking out of place. I eventually decided to revert to the Coustard font I used for my first book. Coustard is friendlier and more readable than a compact comic font.
Text box 80% opacity.
Pure white text bubbles look harsh and seem disconnected from my book’s images. To get a better effect, I set the textbox background opacity to 80% to give the feeling that the boxes are an organic part of the page rather than a sticker pasted on. With the textboxes at 80% opacity the pages have a holistic feel, but I wanted to see how they would look on the printed page. I printed the page above in black and white at 300dpi to get an idea of the levels. They look just right…in black and white, at least.
I’ve moved my Cintiq back to my Windows box and I’m happy now. Clip Studio Paint works better on Windows 10 than on macOS, at least with my gear. I can’t find anything on the Web about poor performance on Macs, so I’m thinking that it may be my Apple hardware that sucks.
Today I returned to page 41, in which Buddy in trying to figure out what to do: should he stay with his loyal friends, or should the join his family in the dangerous migration north? I redrew most of this image, improved the composition and cleaned up the line work. Whenever I return to pictures I drew some time ago, I’m always surprised that the line work needs to much cleanup — I was completely satisfied when I originally checked the page off my TODO list.
Today’s image is Page 36, which I skipped over a few week’s ago when my imagination was going through a barren period. My challenge at the time I first approached this page was to come up with four distinctive varieties of Monarch butterflies. I managed to do that today.
None of these butterflies are even aware that purple-faced butterflies like Buddy even exist, even when he’s standing right in front of him. Butterflies are so small minded! When Buddy asks them if they’ve seen his family, they all answer “no”, probably because they’ve never bothered to look at the world outside their own families. These butterflies are the product of my imagination. I know there’s really no such thing as a Monarch butterfly wearing a sheriff hat, and I know that normal butterflies certainly don’t have a mouth full of huge molars…except in my world they most certainly do.
Today is the first day in one and a half years that I considered not posting a word. Of course I’ll post something, but I’m feeling at a loss for words. The picture I’ve been working on for five days — Buddy airlifting Betty — looks worse the more I work on it, worse than the original concept sketch in every way. Painting this landscape is ridiculously hard and the results are dismal.
Just now I looked through the storyboard to see if there’s a light at the end of this dark tunnel. I found this picture of my friendly King Snake jungle guide. It’s been so long since I’ve looked at the storyboard that I’ve lost touch with where the story is going. I’m feeling thankful that I have this guy to paint, some day. I’m really digging his weird hand.
With the return of freezing weather, the Al Fresco Art Club met in the comfort of our warm kitchen. I chose to copy another Moebius masterpiece from his awesome The World of Edena. In this image Stel and Atan are being sucked into a what looks like an energy star. The original image looks simple, but getting the textured gradient looking good is not simple as I thought it would be. What a fun challenge!
I’ve been working on this image for several days. Jenna Jay is ecstatic; Jimmy is disbelieving; Buddy is indignant; Momma is serene. She’s just told the kids that they have to go North for the summer because that’s what migratory birds and insects do. But Jimmy and Buddy aren’t taking her decision positively.
One of the challenges this picture poses is how to draw expressive hands and faces. When my characters don’t have eyebrows and just have black dots for eyes it’s all the more challenging to use them to express emotion. Hands are always hard.
Gotta work on that bouquet of flowers!
I experimented today with Clip Studio Paint’s reference layers. Reference layers are useful for flatting images. For one thing, color can be applied to a layer beneath a reference layer using a bucket tool and the paint will conform to the line boundaries of the reference layer.
I also continued my search of a simple mono-width digital brush similar to a Rapidograph technical pen. Such a pen brush would have absolutely no features, with no dynamic pressure opacity or flow variables. I haven’t found such a unicorn brush yet — it seems that everyone wants to design fancy brushes, not simple brushes. I’ve checked the Clip Studio Assets site, which has many thousands of brushes, but haven’t found what I want. Perhaps if I could enter the term “mono-width pen” in Japanese I might find something. I’d better start learning some Kanji!
Today I got a late start. I did cardio and weights on the same day. I usually alternate days of cardio and weights. After lunch I found myself falling asleep at the wheel (my pen display), which led to a nap. At 2 pm I was awake enough to get some work done, including two sketches for pages 17 and 18. My “process” is to do all of the roughs at full-size, then go through them one at a time to do the inking, then go through them again to add the color. One inch at a time may sound like a long and slow grind, but it works. Art soldering is the way to get the work done.
Pages 17 and 18. Today I learned that bananas are at most a yellow green when they’re still on the tree. I also learned Mexico produces about 4% of the world’s bananas. That’s plenty of bananas as far as the plot of my story is concerned.
